


Beneath the Mambo Sun (A Fragment)

by dogsbody32



Series: A 946430 [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, First Meetings, Leftovers, fragments, goes with A 946430, i'm not even supposed to be here today, not canon compliant after The Avengers, serious disaster relief, the first part is serious and heavy, the second part is not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 17:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3737809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogsbody32/pseuds/dogsbody32
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She opens her eyes and there's a scruffy man standing over her, peering down with what looks like professional concern. Black hair lank against his scalp, greying at the temples.  Sleeves of his dark blue dress shirt rolled up, arms filthy to the elbow.  Absolutely no breathing mask.  Under the grime, he's too well-dressed to be construction.  Maybe a doctor."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Serious Part to Set the Scene

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zedille](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zedille/gifts).



> Presented mostly out of context, here is some excised material from A 946430 you may enjoy. If you're the sort to find Things That Never Existed interesting, anyway. Full disclosure: I'm just posting it for a friend's later usage. 
> 
> The first part is much more serious than the second, but they were always meant to be in separate chapters, anyway.
> 
> Stay tuned after the show for a few more words from our sponsor!

**Midtown Manhattan - May 2012**

Today, they found twenty more under the collapsed wall of a pizzeria. Lunchtime rush. Anybody lucky died when the bricks came down. Everybody else, it was days of dehydration and starvation in the dark under tons of brick and rebar, baking in an early summer heat wave, broken limbs and broken bodies until slow mad death took them.

First couple of days, it was easy to hurt with the hurting and a fight to keep that upper lip stiff as old stone until she got back to the command structure in the ruins of a bar she remembers from years ago. Now, even the hurt's dried out in the sun and the stink, and all it's in her to do is call Oshimoto to escort the woman twisting her wedding ring -- "I never got to tell him it was twins," she says in a flat voice -- off to the psych tent for a consultation.

On to the next number.

Which turns out to be an obviously pregnant woman with a length of rebar straight through her belly. They lift her out of the rubble with a small crane. "Two for one," says one of the clean-up crew with the coffee-black humor of the brokenhearted, better to laugh, to show they can rise above this kind of slaughter, than to rage uncontrollably.

Maria Hill lowers her head and averts her eyes as the body passes. They won't even be able to drape the woman with a blanket to protect her from the sun.

Maybe there's a husband (or a wife) still to be dug out, and the invaders got the whole family. Or maybe they're wandering now from checkpoint to checkpoint, tacking her photo onto every have-you-seen-me wall, begging every S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and national guardsman and police officer for information.

After she takes a photo of the woman's face, hands shaking with impotent rage and requiring her to snap three or four headshots before there's one good enough for the database, she shoves the camera at Oshi.

"Upload this," she says through the mandatory face mask, voice harsh, throat dry. She can feel her back starting to throb the way it does before the pain flares like a nova. "I'm going on break," she says, striding away before Oshi can argue her out of it, quick and forceful like anybody in the way's going off the nearest overpass. "Twenty minutes. No interruptions. No exceptions."

Around the corner, it's all out of sight but never out of mind. She wants nothing more than to take off the respirator but everybody's learned a few lessons about cleaning up ruins in New York City since the last time. So she squats against the nearest stable standing wall, exhaling in something like relief as her back stops screaming and settles for indelicate whimpering instead.

Madripoor again. Madripoor always. No matter how far she travels, she'll always be getting shot in the same place by the same bullet.

She leans her head against the hot brick, and the sun is warm on her face, and she closes her eyes. And then Oshi's nudging her in the arm and her knees ache instead of her back and saying "we found a child" in a hollow voice. She snaps "I'm coming" and it's all back on again.

The girl had crawled into a hole to escape the aliens, whose cannons then thoughtfully knocked a wall down over the opening. She was smart. She was resourceful. She was brave to crawl for safety rather than freeze with panic.

She was probably eight years old, and she died filthy in the dark with no direction home.

Goddammit.

Goddammit all to hell.

Hill makes Oshi take the photo this time.

She hasn't smoked in almost ten years.

She hasn't needed a cigarette this badly since the day after she quit.


	2. The "Main Event", More or Less

Another break, she opens her eyes and there's a scruffy man standing over her, peering down with what looks like professional concern. Black hair lank against his scalp, greying at the temples. Sleeves of his dark blue dress shirt rolled up, arms filthy to the elbow. Absolutely no breathing mask. Under the grime he's too well-dressed to be construction. Maybe a doctor.

He's also good-looking enough she feels a brief twinge of self-consciousness for the sweat and filth she's been caked in for…weeks. It will probably turn out he's one of the Bugle's best and scummiest, and tomorrow there's gonna be a picture of her on the front page next to a headline about relief workers lying down on the job.

"I was just about to wake you," he says. "You'll get one hell of a sunburn sleeping in the open like this."

"I was in the shadows when I laid down," Hill mutters, pulling herself into a seated position. "Shouldn't you be wearing a mask?"

"My lungs have survived worse than anything this rubble can throw at them," he says indifferently.

"My aide send you to check up on me?" Pushing herself off the ground with aching arms. Twenty minutes without an interruption. Just twenty minutes without having to stare at dead bodies, broken buildings, or the faces of hopeful family members cave in as she has to explain to them that no, we did not find your son alive, Mrs. Cerrillo. Nor can we tell you when his body will be released for burial. If you'd just go with Agent Oshimoto, here, she'll take you to a tent where you can talk to somebody.

"I don't think your aide knows I'm here. She's too busy dealing with the dehydrated kid they just pulled out of a storm drain two blocks from here. I'm here for a smoke break." He shakes a pack of cigarettes back and forth for emphasis.

"What?" She stands up too fast. Her back growls in pain the whole way up and she slams her hand against it. "Goddammit!"

"I wouldn't worry about the kid's prospects," says the guy, tapping one out and holding it to his lips. "They'll give him a unit of saline and some bottled water, he'll be fine. Probably grow up to be a shortstop for the Yankees." He lights the cigarette with a match she can't quite make out through her faceplate. It looks like the flame rises from his fingertip, but that's probably impossible. They don't have _any_ firestarters logged in New York. "Have you given any thought to acupuncture? I had a friend who threw his back out, and he swore it worked wonders.”

"Not that it's any of your business, but I didn't 'throw my back out'," she says, hand still against her lumbar as she steadies herself on her feet. She needs one day not spent on her feet or else Dr. Madsen's cleaning up when this is over. "You got an extra cigarette?"

"I see how it is," he says, gruff but not unfriendly. "First you tell me to butt out, then you try to bum a smoke."

She sighs. "Look, friend. I've been on body detail for days. I've seen so much death, a severed head under a lamp post doesn't phase me anymore. I don't want your lip. I just want a goddamn cigarette. You gonna give me one or am I gonna have to knock you out and take one?"

He looks her up and down for a second, and must decide she means business. He lights one and passes it to her without another word. She pushes her respirator up to her hairline and takes a drag. It's the first time since she quit in Academy, and it burns her airways, and it's bitter on her tongue, but the second she blows the first puff of smoke out her nostrils she feels truly human again for the first time in weeks.

Months, maybe.

Since Barton walked out of Pegasus next to Loki, eyes glowing like one of the undead, and everything went tits up.

However long that's been now.

After that, she looks the guy over, his scarred hands moving in the air in what almost seems to be a pattern as he mumbles something under his breath. He looks like he just stumbled out of the nearest bar after an all-night drunk. Except the sleepy, rheumy weight in his eyes is the kind you get from working forty hours straight without sleep, not from drinking like you've got no choice.

"Sorry," she mutters, but not until after taking a third drag. Why did she ever quit smoking in the first place? "I'm not usually so mean. Especially not to rescue workers."

"If that's the worst thing anybody says to me, it's just too bad." He shrugs, an oddly flamboyant gesture. "If you looked at all this and didn't get angry, that might be something to apologize for."

"Mm," she says. "I'm sorry, anyway."

"Your apology is accepted,” the man says, holding onto the last syllable like he's trying to think of what to say next. “What do I call you?”

"To Mr. and Mrs. Hill, a daughter, Deputy, was born."

"Your parents must have been unusual." He takes a final drag on his cigarette, studying the wreckage like there's something interesting crawling out of it. He stubs it out on the building behind him. A little extra ash can't hurt anything now. "I once had a patient named Pilot."

"Guessing he didn't fly aircraft."

"She did not."

"What did your parents call you?"

"'I saw that, goddammit! Leave your sister alone!'" She swallows a laugh, but a little escapes anyway. "Stephen when I behaved.”

Something falls.

A brick comes loose from a wall across the street and slams into the pavement.

"Maria," she says, abrupt and before she can really think about it.

He looks at her for a moment, in disbelief and in private amusement.  "Of course you are."  He laughs, quiet but knowing, and she wonders what's so funny.  “It's a pleasure to meet you," he says. "Maria."

 

* * *

 

On the day the last of the power is restored, one of the relief workers in headquarters – it used to be an Irish bar – hooks an iPod into the PA system. The surviving beer is tapped, and the surviving wine is poured, and for an evening normal life seems almost within reach again.

Springsteen's singing, something about sparks and fires, when he find his way over to her table in the corner with an offer.

"I don't dance very much," she says.

"The trick," he says, hand extended for her to take or not take, "is letting the rhythm pick you up and carry you off."

"Do you really believe that?"

"No," he says.

“Your honesty is appreciated.”

"But I'd at least like to see if I can twirl you to the beat without flinging you into a pile of wreckage."

She looks from his outstretched hand, calloused and gnarled and scarred, to his face, open and hopeful.

Everything about him says it's her choice.

Everything about him always says it's her choice.

"When you put it like that," she says, palm flat on the table as she pushes herself to her feet, "how can I possibly refuse?"

 

* * *

"It's not really you," she says, keeping her voice low and her mouth near his ear. It's enough to dance with a man in a public venue with the potential for dozens of other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to see them and start the grapevine buzzing in the morning. She'd rather not have anybody overhearing their conversation, too.

"How am I not myself?" His hand is steady against her lower back through her tanktop, still damp with the desperate sweat of another day spent picking through toxic rubble for alien scraps. It feels like he's trying to brace her, just in case. If the calloused weight of his palm didn't feel so nice through the cotton she'd bite at him for his presumption.

"This whole we'll-all-float-on routine you fall back on," she says. "You're as highly strung as I am."

"What makes you say that?"

"Everything I've seen in two weeks," she says, "but let's start with your shoulders."

He tilts his head back to look at her, amused surprise written all over his features. "Fair enough."

"They're tight enough to bounce a rock off of." She slides one hand up his arm, gently squeezing the muscle for emphasis. Broad as he stands, he's still got more than she expected. It's... kind of nice, actually. "You feel like you're more stressed than anybody I've met outside of S.H.I.E.L.D."

"Maybe I just skipped my weekly massage."

"Or maybe you're under enough tension you're ready to snap."

"We can't rule that out," he says.

"And then there are your eyes." She takes the opportunity to take another look at him straight on. In this light, they're an impressive green, the shade vivid enough to remind her of the magic in an old Disney movie.

"What about my eyes?"

"You're, what, forty?"

"A gentlemen never tells," he says seriously enough she'd believe he meant it except she's close enough to see the muscles at the corners of his eyes bunch up, the only outward sign of internal amusement.

Face like his, he'd have been a _great_ field agent.

"Your eyes look more like you're four hundred."

"Don't rush to judgment on something like that before you have all the facts," he says mildly.

"And it doesn't take a genius to see you're not really a surgeon," she says. "Not anymore. Not with those fingers."

"Very good, Deputy Hill," he says, spinning her in time to the beat.

"I am a trained professional," she says. " _Doctor_ Strange." She takes hold of his arm as she spins back around to face him, stealing the lead away from him on the next step.

"So, what _do_ you think I do?"

"Besides dance like a concrete block on little legs?”

"I haven't stepped on your feet _yet_.”

"My first thought was you were one of Fury's invisible indians, popping out of the landscape to keep an eye on me."

"I don't know who that is."

"You walk like a surgeon, but you can't operate with those fingers."

"As we've established."

"And you don't have a medical practice 'cause you're not working out of the medical tent," she says.

"I'm just an upstart juggler," he says as if reciting a rehearsed quote, "ready to help the tightrope walkers when they tumble to the net."

"You're being very evasive."

"Remind me what you do for a living, again."

"I should try interrogating you," she says. "I'll have you know I'm an expert at getting to the bottom of things." It's not until after the words have left her mouth that she realizes just how far past flirty her tone's gone.

"Oh, I believe you," says Stephen with an indulgent smile.

"People are very responsive to my techniques," she says, head still swimming home through suddenly urgent currents. "I could arrange a private demonstration." And yet it never occurs to her to stop kicking.

"Maybe you should," he says, lips close against her ear.

The warm evening feels a lot warmer.

Maybe it's the air, or the wind, or even the plastic cup of boxed wine she'd had before he'd asked her to dance.

(She knows it's not, it's red wine which brings this out in her and she'd had white, but to admit otherwise seems almost indecent.)

Blue Swede fades out.

Spandau Ballet fades in.

Were Maria Hill the sort of woman to credit celestial signs and portents, the change in music would definitely say something.

"Some bait and switch," she says, feigning cool. "Going straight from fast to the slow-dance jam of 1985."

"1983, actually," he says. "And I've been baited into worse switches," he says, slipping his hand higher up the curve of her back as they sway to the tune.

"Easy for you to say," she says, winning an inner war against an inner voice which sounds so much like her father, resting her head on his shoulder. It's been weeks and weeks of unreality. She's surprised how sturdy, how broad, how real he feels against her now. "You're wearing full clothes."

"Filthy clothes."

"You have _sleeves_. I'm peeling like old paint, I haven't seen a razor since April, and I smell like I crawled out of a garage."

"We smell like we crawled out of the same garage."

They sway in silence for a while more, and she can feel it now, feel it with surety from toe-tip to the fine dark hair on her forearms, and she opens her mouth to say something anything everything to get it into the air between them now now now.

"You know," he says first, sliding one hand back along her hip, more or less in time to the music. "Sometimes, dancing with a beautiful woman's like seeing the future. Until you've kissed her --"

Just like that, the window is open. It would be a shame not to slip through it.

She presses her lips to his, quick and vivid like she's stealing it and there are guards who could turn this way and catch them out at any moment.

"Mmm," she says, pulling away with a not-so-secret smile. "You were saying?"

"I was saying that until you've kissed her, how do you know what the future holds?"

He bends his head and kisses the tip of her nose. "Of course, after you've kissed her, it's too late." He kisses her mouth again, lazy and careful and slow like he has all the time in the world and this is the only way he wants to spend it, and she shivers despite the warm night. "Yep," he whispers, forehead resting against hers. "Too late."

She strokes the back of his neck with long fingers, tips tracing the thin fuzz at the nape of his neck. "You should take me home," she says, pitching her voice for him and only him, rich with promise. Her eyes are bright as they stare into his.

He nods, and with a slow smile says, "Definitely too late."  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A fragment, as promised in the title. About 99% of this was written throughout last spring and summer, and there's a lot more where it came from you probably won't see. Depending on your response, I suppose, it's a tantalizing hint of what isn't going to be or an underdeveloped curiosity. Either way, like I said, I'm mainly posting it for a friend's later referral.
> 
> In any case: the title comes from T. Rex's “Mambo Sun”, which name-checks Doctor Strange. You can also find quotes or paraphrases from I Heart Huckabees, Grosse Pointe Blank, Excalibur, and Richard Thompson's “The Great Valerio”. The role of Strange in this story was written before his casting, and thus was not meant to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Better results might be obtained if you swap in Jon Hamm, Tom Hardy, or Joaquin Phoenix.
> 
> All characters clearly copyrighted by various tentacles of the Disney Corporate Entity.


End file.
